Ocean City

"A ferry ride away from The Commonwealth, Ocean City, Maryland, was a popular Pre-War vacation destination. These days it is home to several groups vying for power, though The Boardwalk is still a popular locale for those looking for some fun and games."'

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Ocean City got its start as a land grab by the Fenwick family when they purchased the land that it would later be built upon from the local native population. The land sat largely empty and unused until the mid-1800s when Isaac Coffin built a small rental cottage near the shore, catering predominantly to casual visitors seeking a place to fish and enjoy the natural beauty of the area. This started an early boom of growth wherein rental cottages grew into a small resort community.

Over the following decades, hotels and dance halls attracted more and more tourism to the area. The community thrived. After a brutal hurricane altered the surrounding landscape, the community found itself becoming a thriving fishing port in addition to a tourism hotspot. After the Second World War, Ocean City began to grow by leaps and bounds. Condominiums and business sprung up throughout the community and Ocean City became a significant distraction as tensions with China mounted in the years before the Great War, and it was a significant commerce center for the Columbia Commonwealth.

When the bombs fell from the sky and effectively destroyed the United States, Ocean City was largely spared from the devastation throughout the continent. While its proximity to the Capital bombardment caused many hardships in the area, no direct destruction affected the city beyond flooding as the Ocean waters rose and violent storms swept through the area.

The Fenwick and Coffin families both survived the War, and they saw their salvation in the restoration of Ocean City. As the waters receded and the storms began to calm, the families began to rebuild. The families both knew that neither could succeed and thrive without the other and an uneasy truce was struck. The Boardwalk, which was still largely intact, was put back together with the help of other survivors of the War; with the side effect of many of said survivors beginning to form into gangs to stake claims of territory within the slowly reviving city. Seeing this increasing territoriality and rivalries among the local populace, the families knew that there was relatively little they could do to stop it. Not to mention the increasing boldness of the freakish mutant hillbillies encroaching on the city; despite the gangs creating chaos and danger on the Boardwalk, they also managed to keep the mutants in check.

Instead of risking mutant encroachment, the families decided to isolate one of the more affluent neighborhoods in the area as their own personal community within the city. Thus, Old Town was born. Old Town was built with the sole purpose of returning to the affluence and ideals of the Pre-War world; only the most refined and respectable individuals were invited to leave the necessary evils and chaos of the Boardwalk behind and enjoy the best that Ocean City has to offer. None of this was sufficient for the City to truly thrive, as food and fresh water supplies were difficult to come by, and proved to be a major source of conflicts between the denizens of the city. Fortunately, in the last half century the Ancient Mariners docked nearby and made contact with the founding families, offering them a solution to their supply shortage. In exchange for bringing the population clean water, food, and other needed supplies as they made thier way up and down the coast on their trade routes, the Mariners would be offered both the right to trade with the locals and set up shop in the White Marlin Marina as needed.

With the final major stumbling block resolved, Ocean City was finally able to thrive and reach a state resembling the grandeur and success that it had before the War. In recent decades, Ocean City has become a shining beacon of civilization on the East Coast, drawing in both those who seek the stability of the Old World and those who seek to eke out a place for themselves in the closest thing that the Wastelands have to a functioning city. This includes scouts from the nearby Brotherhood of Steel, a small contingent of medics and humanitarians loosely affiliated with the Western Followers of the Apocalypse, would-be gangers and raiders, traders and fisherman, and even just those seeking to strike it rich in one of the small casinos of the City.